Rewiring the Case House, Phase MMCCCXLV

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“Nuke it from orbit. That’s the only way to be sure.”

That’s a line from Aliens, the Ridley Scott movie about, well, aliens, albeit not the cute, cuddly variety.

That’s how I’m feeling about my house wiring.

Over the years, the wiring situation in my house has evolved. Sure, we’ve done some good things, like adding a Leviton structured wiring panel to manage the home data network.

But we’ve never used the wiring panel to its full potential. Right now, it’s just feeding POTS (phone) service and CAT5e to four locations in the house, even though it’s capable of routing fiber and coax as well. The pair of Netgear 16-port gigabit switches mainly handles traffic to those four locations and the test systems in my house.

Meanwhile, other aspects of my home wiring setup have simply happened ad hoc, with no real planning.

Many years ago, prior to cable modems and DSL, we had ISDN, so the phone service here is still ISDN capable—but that digital line is just used for a fax machine now. Meanwhile, my wife’s employer paid for a new phone line—that runs directly into her office, and nowhere else.

That makes things difficult for her, because she can’t easily work from anywhere else in the house. Sure, she could add a cordless phone—but then we’ll have multiple sets around the house in addition to the existing cordless phones.

Later, we added cable broadband through Comcast. The installer came in, ran the cable willy-nilly around our home exterior, drilled a couple of holes in our walls, and ran cable into the house.

Sometime after that, we added Dish Network satellite service, which resulted in another coax run down the exterior walls and into a hole outside the family room. When we added high definition satellite service, a second Echostar dish needed to be installed, with yet another coax cable.

Finally, I installed an OTA (over the air) HD antenna, mostly for internal testing—which meant a fourth coax cable. I now have four holes drilled in random locations in my east-facing wall.

It all came to a head when we installed the solar power system. As a result of that install, we need to paint the exterior of the house. The thought of painting over those random cable runs gave us fits, so we decided to redo the exterior run.

Despite having built numerous PCs, I am neither an electrician nor do I ever want to touch drywall again. So we started interviewing contractors.

One guy we talked to had some good ideas. He noticed the Leviton box, and suggested we run everything to that, and fan service out from the panel, including all that coax.

The exterior coax would all be consolidated into one junction box, which would look much neater. We’d add a drop for multiple coax drops plus CAT5e in the family room, solving that little problem once and for all.

Since we were doing that, I thought we’d also run some speaker wire in-wall in the family room. Right now, all the speaker wire is partially concealed by curtains, or baseboards, but it’s definitely unsightly.

I’d suggested having plates with either spring clips or banana connectors in the back walls, for adding two rear surround speakers. The contractor suggested adding in-ceiling speakers. While I’m not real fond of in-wall or in-ceiling speakers, they’d work well for rear surrounds. I can even get Paradigm units which would be close match acoustically for my existing 5.1 audio system.

Of course, any project tends to suffer from some feature creep, and ours is no different. My wife wanted to add some lighting, so we’re having a number of recessed lights installed, using fixtures deep enough so compact fluorescent bulbs would fit well.

While I’d like to add whole house control, that’s probably impractical at this point—my single-room home theater system doesn’t really need a full Crestron setup. Still, there are point light switches with IR controls that could be very handy.

Heck, I’ve even convinced my wife to paint the family room a neutral, pale gray, so that the HDTV colors wouldn’t be overly influenced by the walls.

So once again, we’re embarking on yet another wiring project. But we’re essentially starting from scratch, and the system that’s going in will take into account all our media and data routing needs.

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